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Stairway To Heaven (Live At The Kennedy Center Honors)
"Stairway To Heaven (Live At The Kennedy Center Honors)" is a single from Heart released in January 2013 in response to the viral video success of their live performance of "Stairway To Heaven" at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to honorees Led Zeppelin. "Stairway" reached #1 on Jessica's Top 40, becoming Heart's first #1 since "WTF" in 2010 and the first cover song to reach #1 since Lita Ford and Twisted Sister's "I'll Be Home For Christmas" in 2008. The influence of legendary rock band Led Zeppelin on Heart has always been known, especially in the band's early work. So it would come as no surprise that Heart would be selected to pay tribute to Led Zeppelin when the band was selected as one of the honorees of the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors, which honors outstanding contributions to the performing arts. Led Zeppelin, made up of vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones and late drummer John Bonham (whose son Jason is also a drummer and charted as a member of Foreigner and Black Country Communion), was a top selling album-oriented rock band in the 1970s and they remain popular to this day. "Stairway To Heaven", released from their 1971 album Led Zeppelin IV, is widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest rock and roll songs of all time. Heart paid tribute to the band by performing their own rendition of "Stairway To Heaven" at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in December 2012; it wasn't the first time Heart covered the song, as they've performed their own version as early as 1976 and even included a live cover as a bonus track on the 2004 reissue of their second album Little Queen. The Kennedy Center Honors performance was a stirring, faithful rendition of the Zeppelin original that featured an orchestra and two choirs. The performance was widely acclaimed and even made the surviving members of the band cry. In an interview with Spinner.com, Nancy Wilson said of the performance, "We kept going back and watching it again because we didn't see how much the Zep guys were so positively affected by it and so emotionally affected by it. And it was totally a lifetime moment. We were so happy that we were able to honor them correctly because getting up there and doing a song of such epic proportion and doing it front of the President, the First Lady and Led Zeppelin, hey no pressure man. Afterwards they all came back and said 'Way to go. It sounded awesome.' And Robert said, 'Oh, I've just learned to really abhor that song. I hate it, I hate it, I hate that song because people just murder that song, but you guys pulled it off and it was great and really excellent.'" Heart's "Stairway" performance was not only acclaimed, but also proved to be a viral video, with a YouTube video of the performance netting over 4 million views. Popular demand led to a digital-only single of the performance being released for a limited time, and proved to be Heart's biggest single since 1993's Desire Walks On as it briefly cracked the top 100 most downloaded songs on iTunes and made a charting appearance on Billboard's Rock Songs chart. On Jessica's Top 40, "Stairway To Heaven" debuted immediately following the Kennedy Center Honors performance's release to iTunes with instant impact at #38 the week of January 20, 2013, upstaging Justin Timberlake's comeback. It rapidly climbed up the chart in the weeks that followed and spent the last week of March at #1, becoming Heart's first chart-topper since "WTF" in 2010. It also was the first cover song to reach the top spot since 2008, when Lita Ford and Twisted Sister's "I'll Be Home For Christmas" debuted on top.